Teachers' assessments also revealed that ROE children demonstrated significantly lower levels of proactive aggression (i.e., bullying others) than the control group, and they were less likely to view violent aggression as an effective means for obtaining social goals. ROE children also showed more significant improvement in their pro-social behaviors than children in the control group.
For children who were violently aggressive before enrolling in the study, 88 percent of those who participated in ROE showed a decreasing tendency toward violent aggression compared to only 9 percent of children in the control group. Preliminary findings also suggest that ROE enhances children's emotional understanding and positive social skills. Larger and longer-term studies are being prepared to examine this finding more thoroughly.
Learning from a Baby
Scientific studies show that abuse during a child's formative years affects the formation of the brain and can interfere with their ability to form healthy personal relationships throughout their life. As a result, children that have been abused often spend their lives struggling to form attachments and to participate in society.
However, recent child development research indicates that teaching children to be compassionate and caring, and to recognize and manage their
own emotions can mitigate the impact of such violence. ROE is grasping that potential.
It addresses the affective domain of learning by teaching emotional literacy – the ability to recognize and understand emotions. By observing the loving relationship between a parent and baby, students learn to recognize the baby's feelings and to develop appropriate strategies to meet the baby's needs. This acts as a bridge that helps students understand their own emotions and those of their peers.
A 13-year-old girl noted in her evaluation of ROE that "the program taught me that everybody has different feelings and to always respect everyone's individuality."
"ROE has taught me how to appreciate people that aren't the same as me and to understand that just because they are different outside doesn't mean they are different inside," said a 13-year-old boy.
Learning to Walk in Another's Shoes
A ROE instructor meets with a class before and after each visit by an infant and parent(s), for a total of 27 sessions. Each session lasts approximately 40 minutes.
During a typical family visit, students observe, ask questions, and discuss the baby's behavior and temperament with the ROE instructor and the child's parents. Through these interactions they gain insights into the infant's growth and development. They also learn to respond appropriately to what the baby is trying to "tell them" through physical cues.
That ability to understand what someone else is feeling is a skill Gordon said she hopes the students will apply outside the classroom. There is evidence that this is happening. As one 13-year-old student commented, "Before I do anything to another person, I will put myself in their shoes and see their perspective of the problem."
Courtesy Roots of Empathy
The serious business of gently checking to see whether the baby's toes are ticklish teaches children respect for the baby's body and their own bodies
The ROE curriculum endorsed and recommended by Canadian Curriculum Services is targeted to children ages 4 to 14 year, divided into four groupings by grade level: kindergarten (ages 4 to 5), primary (ages 6 to 8), junior (ages 9 to 11) and senior (12 to 14). Each visit focuses on a different theme related to the baby's development, such as planning and caring for the baby, crying, and language.
Ideally, children participate in the program through two or more age groupings. Each of these groupings is designed to work by itself and as part of the larger series.
ROE has been designed for the classroom because "the classroom is the world in miniature," Gordon said. "You get all kinds of students and all kinds of citizens. We need to deliver students to a civic society with more than just book learning and work skills. We also have to give all children the ability to fully participate in the world and form healthy relationships. The idea is to create a more caring society, from the classroom out."
The Really Important Things: Love and Respect
When a teacher or principal requests an ROE program for their school, the school must make a serious commitment to fund it. It must find local funding to pay for the instructor's honorarium and the few required supplies. It also must agree to share school resources and form a working partnership with the ROE staff and instructor.
All instructors attend a four-day training course and pass an exam at the end of the training. They receive training in child development, basic neuroscience and emotional literacy.
Each instructor receives ongoing support from the ROE office, including classroom visits by ROE staff once during the first year of operation and once again during the second year. Mentors are identified and trained to provide local support during the second year. The mentors receive support from the ROE office.
Courtesy Roots of Empathy
Students learn how learning happens: the combination of stimulation and nurturing fosters competent children who can cope well with life
Instructors are either volunteers or professionals such as public health nurses, police officers, social workers, and principals who take time off from their full-time jobs to participate. Gordon insists that classroom teachers cannot be the instructor for their own classes to ensure quality of program delivery.
Instructors work with principals and teachers to locate appropriate local families whom their classroom will "adopt." ROE makes an effort to recruit minorities and untraditional families.
"In a small, mostly white town, we don't necessarily want the family with 2.4 children and a picket fence," Gordon said. "We want the Chinese family or the single-parent family. We're also here to show that the really important things for good parenting are love and respect."
Parents often agree to participate in ROE because they are interested in creating more caring environments in the schools where they have enrolled their own children. "By helping the children understand how other people might feel, I believe my baby and I are making a contribution to reducing the bullying in our school and in our community," said a parent who is involved in ROE.
A Force to Reckon With
ROE's success has led to requests for the program from every province and territory in Canada, as well as from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. Gordon's work has received such acclaim outside Canada that in 1999, U.S. Vice President Al Gore invited Mary to participate as an expert in his "Family Re-Union 9" conference.
Gordon is a force to be reckoned with. At 53, never still and always one step ahead, she books a cross-continental flight on a Saturday
afternoon – to take advantage of a cheap fare – in order to attend a Monday meeting.
As a child on Canada's eastern shore, she watched her mother prepare meals for the residents of the local penitentiary when they were released from prison. Inmates knew that when they re-entered the world they could go to Mrs. Dyers' house for a decent meal.
While her mother was preparing the food, Mary and her siblings were given the task of entertaining their guests. "My mother believed that these were men who had had a hard life, and that they deserved a little decency." It is that kind of feeling – a willingness to experience life by standing inside someone else's shoes – that Mary hopes to instill through her work.
Before she founded ROE, Gordon taught kindergarten was and the well-known and well-loved founder of the Toronto Board of Education's Family Literacy Centers. Located in 34 of Toronto's inner-city public schools, the centers offer parenting support and education, while providing a local place for parents and schools to connect.
From this she learned there is no one "right" way to be a parent. But also realized that all good parents – and citizens – have one thing in common: an ability to feel empathy for others.
Gordon founded ROE in 1997 in response to the violence against children that she witnessed while working with families. Today, ROE is touted as a program that prevents all forms of violence, not just family violence.
Beyond this, Mary's deepest wish is that the program will help break the cycle of abuse by teaching all children how to see what others feel, to feel empathy themselves, and to learn the basics of good parenting.
The Key to all Virtues
ROE has grown from a pilot program in six Toronto classrooms in Toronto in 1997 to 191 programs in 140 schools in 2001-2002, reaching 4,875 students across Canada. This year, there are ROE programs in seven out of ten Canadian provinces. In the coming year, ROE's four-day instructor-training course will be offered to an additional 250 instructors across Canada, more than doubling the number of participating classrooms.
Gordon is also supervising a small pilot project in Tokyo that was started by a group of Japanese social workers who were initially researching Gordon's earlier work at Family Literacy Centers. Now Japan's Department of Education is considering how to bring ROE to Japan in a bigger way.
While noting that the Canadian suicide rate has increased 30-fold in the past decade, Gordon suggests that the situation isn't worse in Canada than elsewhere in the world – but she says it is more noticeable. "In a strong and peaceful democracy such as Canada, you have the luxury of focusing on issues like youth suicide and family violence," she said. "In countries that are at war, this might seem frivolous. But it is something that all societies eventually will have to address."
Gordon says she targets empathy because she believes it encompasses all the other attributes that parents hope instill in their children such as honesty and integrity. A child who has a true sense of how others feel and how their actions affect others is more likely to act with honesty and caring. Empathy, in Gordon's opinion, is the key to all the other virtues.
But Gordon is quick to point out that ROE is not just about reducing bullying. This is one easily measurable outcome, but Gordon hopes ROE will ultimately change the tenor of relationships. She hopes all children will learn to have responsible, responsive relationships, a sense of connectedness and a sense of their own importance to society.
Needs:
- Volunteer translators. ROE is interested in producing all their materials in a variety of languages for immigrant parents, and for those for whom English is not a first language.
- Donations to cover instructor training costs and materials costs. To donate online, please visit: http://canadahelps.org/public/home.asp
Contact:
Mary Gordon
Roots of Empathy
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 205
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
Tel: 416-944-3001
Email: mail@rootsofempathy.org
Web site: www.rootsofempathy.org
Christy Gibb is the Associate Director of Ashoka Canada. She launched Ashoka in her home country, Canada, after working for Ashoka in Washington D.C. She has also worked in South Africa and Bolivia and has a background in engineering.
Read more articles on this topic:
Mother and a Roots of Empathy instructor help interpret a baby's cues. Naming the baby's feelings gives children a vocabulary for discussing their own feelings.
Children appreciate how tiring it is for a baby to hold up her head and how frustrating it is not to be able to move. By seeing things from a baby's perspective they learn empathy.
November 2002 Journal Home Page